iThemes

For the redesign of this site, I wanted to implement various design elements, in particular related to the Responsive Design, made possible by iThemes Builder.

One of those elements is that when visiting the home (blog index) page in mobile view, only the excerpt on the first post is displayed, all other posts are displayed as titles only. Of course, I could have edited the theme file to add a counter, and conditional code to display or not display the excerpt. However, I try to minimise changes to template files, and prefer to use a function, and CSS to accomplish such functionality.

The new WordPress 3 navigation menus are an excellent tool to design your own menus, mixing pages, categories and custom links. iThemes created video tutorials on how to use the new WordPress navigation in Builder and Flexx theme. The following tutorial will show how you can replace the text links in the navigation menu with images. It can be used for any theme, on any WordPress site running WordPress 3+, but it is based on iThemes Flexx.

Both the layout of this site, as well as Builder has evolved (one way or another) and I do not recommend the methods described in this article. For general information, it may be useful, but there are better and easier ways to accomplish the same.

As requested in this post on the iThemes support forum, here are the instructions to create a page template for the iCompany Theme series by iThemes (these instructions will most likely work for iCar and iRealEstate as well). This template will not have the grey bar and the featured area, and the main content will expand to the right until the right tabber sidebar.